6 Critical Steps for Crafting Your Own Digital Marketing Plan

The modern world of business has changed drastically over the years, especially with the AI boom. Technology has become a major part of any company’s success. In order to stay competitive, it is imperative that a company needs to have a digital marketing plan in place. A successful digital marketing plan requires dedication, effort, and a well-thought-out plan.

Understanding what you want to achieve with your marketing plan is very important. You need to think about your business model, what you want to achieve, how you want to reach your audience, and where you want to go. However, it’s not an easy task to manage the digital world by yourself, so here are five steps for making your own digital marketing plan.

Step 1. Define your goals

This is the most important step you need to do before starting any digital marketing campaign. In order to achieve success in your marketing plan, it is important that you have goals to work towards. By having goals, you can measure your success and see what needs improvement. In addition, you will also have a greater sense of accomplishment when you achieve your goals. What are your goals? Are you looking for an increase in traffic, leads, or sales? This will help you reach out to them and make an educated decision on the type of content that you will create to make your campaign successful. Not only should your goals be specific, but they should also be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed.

First, break down your goal into SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). An example would be to increase website traffic by 10,000 visits by end of January. How is this goal attainable? Would it be realistic to have 10,000 more visitors? Is it attainable for this website on a monthly basis? Would this goal be useful for this website? Then, you can break down your goal into specific strategies.

Step 2. Create a strategy

Now that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, it’s time to develop a strategy of what you will do to achieve those goals. What are your tactics? Will you use SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing, etc? Will you use a new or existing website? How will you measure your success?

As you develop your plan, you will see that there will be many questions that you need to ask yourself. The steps for making a marketing strategy are relatively simple. However, if you’re not knowledgeable or unsure about how to do it on your own, it’s recommended you hire a marketing specialist to create the strategy for you.

Step 3. Create content

Do you want to have a digital marketing plan that builds rapport with customers and creates more leads for your business? Content creation can be quite challenging at times because you have to brainstorm what content you have to share with your audience. First, take the time to do research about what your customers are looking for. Second, take the time to do research about what your competitors are doing. It’s not necessary to do a competitor analysis, but it is good to be aware of what your competitors are doing.

One of my favourite books, Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon, mentions that when you’re just getting started, it can be challenging to come up with new ideas and figure out how to accomplish things. That’s why it’s always good to start off with rebuilding what another individual has done. Third, take the time to create content that is relevant to your audience. Once you have created content with these three things in mind, sit down and organize your content in a way that makes sense to your audience.

Step 4. Distribute content

Do you know that the content marketing team at an organization typically spends most of their time distributing content? That’s what it can take to be successful in this field. But what does it really mean to distribute content, and how do you do it? Distributing content means that you not only create the content but you also make sure that your audience sees it, too. This includes distributing articles to social media sites, posting links to your content to your blog, and promoting these articles through email and social media.

Now, you might think that you’re already distributing content, but are you really? Take a look at your content from a distribution standpoint. If what you’re writing is a blog post, then how are you sharing it? Do you have your content on a separate web page, or do you have it embedded on the page? Are you promoting your content through email? How about social media? Do you have optimized graphics or videos that you’re linking to your content? If you don’t have concrete answers to these questions, then you’re probably not distributing your content properly.

Step 5. Measure your success

Once you have your strategies and tactics, you need to determine how you will measure your success. How will you know whether your goals are working for you? How can you determine if your marketing plan is successful? You can use a variety of tools to measure your success. One of the most popular tools is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web tool that will help you measure your success when it comes to your website. You can use this tool to measure the following:

• Visitors who have come to your website from other websites
• The visitors’ source, country, and device they used
• The amount of time that people spend on your website
• The search terms and keywords that people are using to find you
• And much more!

By using tools like Google Analytics, you can make changes to your website and marketing plan to determine whether you are accomplishing your goals. That’s why step 1 is goal setting. If you don’t have goals, then you’ll be making changes without a concrete vision of what you want to accomplish. You can use this as a way to measure your success. Also, don’t forget to set objectives or key performance indicators!

Step 6. Improve and set new goals

Having a plan is important when it comes to achieving your goals. But, you can’t simply set one goal and hope to achieve it. You need to continue to measure results, improve on them, and add new SMART goals. The problem is, most businesses are not very good at keeping track of their marketing and promotion. This is because they are overwhelmed with trying to grow their business, make it successful, and stay on top of things. After a business does market research and measures their own results to see what worked and what didn’t work, they may decide to make some changes to their digital marketing plan. But, they may not do this often enough. If you are looking for better results, then you should set new goals and look to improve all aspects of your digital marketing plan. When you set new goals, you are able to make a plan to make your business more successful.

Final Thoughts

Many people who are unfamiliar with the digital marketing world are often unsure how to begin. Creating a digital marketing plan can be difficult and time-consuming. However, the process is simplified by focusing on these six core steps: creating a strategy, creating content, distributing content, measuring your success, and improving and setting new goals.

If you are an established business or a new startup, these six steps can help you stay on top of your digital marketing efforts. Let me know in the comments below about challenges you faced or currently facing with your digital marketing plan.